📶 the PE fight over Thrasio

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Good morning 👋

Thrasio declared bankruptcy earlier this year, and we’re still feeling the affects of it. Oaktree Capital Management penned a letter to investors criticizing other Thrasio investors (most notably Silver Lake) for their oversight of the company.

It’s not completely unheard of for investors to throw other co-investors under the bus whenever a company goes south, but you don’t often see the beef aired out behind closed doors (and you almost never see it in venture circles).

The headlines from yesterday cover that plus a few more stories you may have missed.

TL;DR:

• 📰 News

• 🔗 Links

• 🐥 Tweet

• 💰 Funds

• ™️ Startups

• 📶 Recs

• 🗳 Poll

HEADLINES
Thrasio fallout = PE fight 🥊

• E-commerce Firm Thrasio’s Collapse Leads to Private Equity Fight (PYMNTS)

• Can Venture Capital Keep Itself Afloat? (WSJ)

• Progress acquires file management platform ShareFile for $875M (TechCrunch)

• European VC Atomico closes $1.24B across two funds for early and growth-stage startups (TechCrunch)

• Oregon Struggles With Private-Equity Performance, Allocation Challenges (WSJ)

• Bookkeeping startup Finally grabs $200M as AI bolsters enterprise fintech (Pitchbook)

LINKS

📋 Nike’s Manifesto: 10 statements from Nike about their business

💹 10 Charts That Capture How the World is Changing: From VC fundraising to mobile game spending, church attendance to AI freelancing

💈 Cumulative vs. Cyclical Knowledge: To quote Morgan Housel, “cyclical knowledge, and the inability to fully learn from others’ past experiences, means you have to accept a level of volatility and fragility no found in other fields”

🧮 Unsure How Much You Should Pay Yourself?: Check out this found salary calculator

🗣️ The Podcast Beginner’s Fast Start Guide: Big Technology brings everything you need to know about starting a podcast

TWEET

FUNDS

Explore all new funds (along with contact info) 👉 here.

STARTUPS (Together with Harmonic)
a16z-backed companies formed in 2024 🔎

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RECS

• SCALE Newsletter: Weekly insights directly from the world’s best growth-stage founders and investors

• Creator Spotlight: Deep dives every Friday on building an audience with social media and newsletters

• The Product-Led Geek: Unlock the secrets of product-led success

COMMUNITY
What do investors from USV, Bessemer, Founders Fund, Accel have in common?

They’ve all joined this private investor community.

Here are a few reasons you should think about doing the same …

👥 Member directory: Venture is a networking game after all, right? Join 2,100+ other investors already inside and get access to the entire member directory once accepted

🔎 VC resource library: 400+ VC-specific templates, prompts, and other resources to become a better investor

📋 Dealflow-as-a-service: 1,000+ investment memos (and counting) so you never run out of deal flow

🗣 Investor-only Slack: Where venture, growth, and private equity can answer hard-to-find questions and gather signal through the noise

**Only full-time investors admitted

POLL

Thanks for reading this far and giving us a little bit of your attention this week.

Feel free to unsubscribe whenever this stops becoming valuable to you.

- Clay

RESULTS

Here are the results from our poll question in yesterday’s piece:

What would be your biggest risk / concern for new space tech companies?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Launch reliability / failure risk (6)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Regulatory risk (5)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Infrastructure bottlenecks (3)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Geopolitical risk (3)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Supply chain fragility (4)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Funding cycles / capital intensity (6)

27 Votes